I have given up on Medium several times. Too much information, not enough differentiation, but that’s true about the entire information environment in which we now find ourselves.
Friends of mine who have fled from Facebook are coming back again because, in the information age, Facebook provides an immediate fix of interactivity that counteracts the alienation so common among those who are oversaturated with mostly depressing information.
I find myself feeling compelled to come back here…and that has nothing to do with the $5 a month I kick into the kitty. (This visit was triggered by the notice that three cents were deposited into my account. Brother, couldn’t you spare a dime, even?)
There is so much to talk about but then posting things on my own website feelings like yelling into an empty well. What does it say about your website when you don’t even use it yourself?
But here I am with a hard drive filled with novels, stories, articles, two non-fiction books, and more than 1500 poems…and no idea of what to do with the stuff.
We all know that the entire publishing system is broken. Too many publishing outlets are controlled by too few people, and the increasing amount of often irrational censorship (such as Facebook has been indulging in) leads to increasing instances of self-censorship in which people do not say what they really want to say because they are afraid of being banned from the social media they are addicted to.
It’s a sad situation…and, no, I have no remedies to propose, not because I don’t have any but because I don’t have the ability to implement them. No one does.
We have experienced a culture shift that was created by the way in which the World Wide Web has changed all of our communications paradigms. The only way to correct the adverse side effects of this paradigm shift is to trigger another one but no one has the platform necessary to launch such a cultural event because of the way that the communications networks have broken up the mass audience into innumerable and often immiscible pods of people.
The only way to make headway is to saturate social media with your messages and hope that somehow you get through to the right people.
So, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me now, in a lot of different places. When I stop posting, send condolences because that will probably mean that I am dead.
To exist is to communicate. Non-communication is equivalent to non-existence.